Brooke Stamp is probably best known for her long-time association with the Melbourne contemporary dance company, BalletLab.
She met its artistic director and chief choreographer Phillip Adams when he was a teacher and she was a student at the Victorian College of the Arts, and has been his muse since he founded the company in 1998.
Over the years however she has become increasingly his collaborator, gradually forging her own identity as a choreographer. She created a solo work, Orbit Score for Yoko, for Lucy Guerin’s Pieces for Small Spaces (2009); Venus Devotional 2010 for the Next Wave Festival; Metaverse Makeover for the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival in 2011; and Unified Field for a VCA student graduation in 2011.
Last year Adams paid her the compliment of commissioning her first full-length work, for BalletLab – And All Things Return to Nature.
Stamp’s choreography embraces sound as well as performance and arises out of a long and meticulous process of research and experimentation. An essential part of the process is the workshops she conducts. ”I’ve always taught,” she explains, “my teaching practice has been a huge part of my choreographic practice – at the VCA and in various public workshops.
In recent years the workshops have developed into performances – last year for instance I took a public workshop at the Gallery of NSW with visual artist Agatha Gothe-Snape. Specifically the workshops have been related to my interest in improvisation and in my particular process -- about the creation of scores and text and materials to draw from.”
Improvisation is particularly important for her, as both a part of the performance and as a tool in the creation of choreographic material. She was in New York on an Australia Council Professional Skills and Development Award between 2005 and 2007 “when I first started working with artists who were dealing with improvisation, not necessarily as the performance but at least in the making of the performance. It created a certain ‘liveness’ in the performance which really appealed to me as an audience member.”
The word “liveness” is one she uses a lot to describe her aims for her own practice. For her it means a kind of vitality, an immediacy of experience that comes from the spontaneous integration of movement and other performance elements.
She is also influenced by the 1950s US dance theorist Mary Starks-Whitehouse and her theory of Authentic Movement. “I became very interested in the idea of waiting for the impulse to move. I’m curious how this... could become part of the performance experience and provide the audience with that real-time and real-space and real liveness in seeing the dancer develop as the body unfolds in real time.
“I’ve taken that information and used it in my own practice, which includes such things as writing, drawing and sound creating.”
Whitehouse was a pupil of Martha Graham and Mary Wigman. In a wider context, she is part of the lineage of American contemporary dance that began with Isadora Duncan at the turn of the 20th century. The fact that Brooke’s present practice is one that looks back to the past for inspiration is not lost on her. It is a contradiction which she has made the basis for her latest work.
The title – Tearaway: part 1, the crater of motor power – is a reference to the attempt by contemporary dance makers such as herself to “tear away”, as Duncan and Graham did, “from the burden of information embedded in her body and practice, which is paradoxically bound by these women’s legacy”.
“Basically I’ve been looking back to Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan and trying to conceptually re-embody a period of radical change. And I’m looking at where I am now as a dancer in my body and within the current landscape of dance and performance-making.
“It’s my ‘tearaway’ – or the ‘tearaway’ is paralleling what I perceive their ‘tearaway’ to be. I’m trying to understand that original moment of shifting away from classicism and what in 2014 I’m trying to shift away from myself.”
Tearaway was chosen as one of eight works shortlisted for the new Keir Choreographic Award, held in July. This award is an exciting development in Australian art. It is aimed specifically at contemporary dance, and has an exceptionally large prize pool of unprecedented generosity -- $30,000 for the winner plus a $10,000 Audience Award.
At the time of going to press the winners had not been announced, but Stamp’swork was chosen from a field of 77 candidates -- an honour and an acknowledgement of her rising reputation. Nonetheless, the process of taking part in an award, with its competitive nature and rules and strictures, has presented new challenges for this “tearaway” artist.
“For instance, I feel quite uncomfortable sitting in front of audience – I prefer to have them sitting around me – but one of the specific requirements of this award is that we have to make a show that faces the front.” A challenge she will surely improvise her way around.
About the Keir Choreographic Award:
The Keir Choreographic Award is a collaboration between Melbourne’s Dancehouse, Sydney’s Carriageworks and the Keir Foundation. The competition is open to established artists, who are required to submit a five minute video pitch of a 20 minute-long choreographic idea.
The finalists performed at a two-week season at Dancehouse in Melbourne, from which were presented at Carriageworks in Sydney for the finals on July 16 to 19.
Prize money: Winner $30,000 prize
Audience prize: $10,000
The award includes $80,000 worth of funding for the commissioning of new work by the finalists.
SHORTLIST:
Sarah Aiken (Vic)
James Batchelor (Vic)
Tim Darbyshire (Vic)
Matthew Day (Vic)
Atlanta Eke (Vic)
Shaun Gladwell (NSW)
Jane McKernan (NSW)
Brooke Stamp (Vic)
JUDGES:
Mårten Spångberg (Sweden), acclaimed ‘bad boy’ of contemporary dance
Matthew Lyons (US) curator experimental cultural hub The Kitchen in New York
Josephine Ridge (Aus) Creative Director of Melbourne Festival
Becky Hilton (Aus) Australian choreographer, director and teacher
Phillip Keir (Aus)The Keir Foundation Director and visionary for the award.
For more on the Keir award and winners, go to www.danceaustralia.com.au/news/and-the-winner-is.
WHO IS? Phillip Keir
Phillip Keir (pictured), with his wife Sarah Benjamin, is the director of Keir Foundation, a philanthropic association with a goal “to enable artists to make original work of a high order”. The Foundation supports the work of new and emerging practitioners across art forms.
Keir trained as a theatre maker in the US, the UK and Germany. As a student he took dance class at the Merce Cunningham School before working as an intern with the Wooster Group and appearing at the Kitchen in New York. After working as associate director at the Sydney Theatre Company, he created NextMedia, which specialised in popular culture magazines.
The flagship publication was the Australian Rolling Stone magazine, which he bought in 1987 and sold in 2008.
Keir is a board member of the Biennale of Sydney and LIFT – London International Festival of Theatre. With an investment of $500,000, he gained a one-tenth share and a seat on the board of the New York-based VIP Art Fair, then the world’s biggest online art fair, in 2012. This business was acquired by Artspace in 2013.
This article was first published in the August-September 2014 issue of Dance Australia magazine.